World War II was the last war in which there was a clear winner and a clear loser. While there have been minor skirmishes in which one side or the other emerged the unmistakable winner (the Falklands, Grenada would be two examples) the logic of warfare and the exponential leap in destructive capacity that Hiroshima and Nagasaki epitomized, changed the calculus of military action in ways which we are still trying to define.
In Korea, opposing armies fought to a standstill, with neither side willing to risk an expanded war. A stable equilibrium emerged that held until the 1990s when the North Koreans developed their nuclear capacity; the final outcome of the Korean war has not yet been determined.
In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese army and the American army arguably won on the military front but lost on the political front. The Johnson and Nixon administrations were unwilling to take the necessary military action to ensure an unmistakable military victory over North Vietnam for fear of expanding the war and risking a Chinese or Russian nuclear response. Because we stopped far short of total victory and unconditional surrender, and in fact, could never even state those ends as our goal, we essentially confined ourselves to fighting the war on the defensive and never put ourselves and our allies in the position of winning the war. (Even our offensive air attacks were designed to get the North to accept an equilibrium rather than to defeat them.)
Since Vietnam, the disproportion between the modern military might of the United States (and to a lesser extent our allies, the Israelis, British, Australians, et al) whose conventional weapons have escalated to rival the destructive power of nuclear weapons, and the third world armies which face us in conventional and asymmetric warfare, has only continued to expand exponentially.
As a result, we are facing an unprecedented problem in winning any current or future war.
Yesterday, Gerard Vanderleun wrote an impassioned and incisive post on the dilemma of fighting a war "with one hand tied behind our back." In "RULES? IN A KNIFE FIGHT?": Redrafting the Rules of Engagement in the First Terrorist War, he discussed his frustration with those American home front snipers who seem more interested in our troops "behaving correctly" than in winning the war. He concludes that unless we develop a plan for victory, we will lose, not militarily but politically:
Absent a plan for victory, the current state of a low-level, hunt-and-peck war in Iraq will cease to be supported. The conflict will soon become either a hunkered down, bunkered up Korean policing program, or it will fizzle and gutter out. To gutter out and retreat would be to court disastrous consequences for the United States in the short term and the entire world in the future; a future more costly to the planet in terms of life, liberty and treasure than anything currently being done in Iraq.
If we end up retreating from Iraq (which is what the Feinsteins and Murthas suggest, and will become inevitable if the Bush administration does not find a way to prosecute this war to victory), the next, inevitable, attack which causes mass casualties in America is likely to trigger another war with different rules of engagement:
The tragedy is that the second path, the path of Total War in which extreme new rules of engagement come into play, requires the triggering event of a second catastrophic attack on American civilians on American soil. That event, should it be allowed to occur, will cost the lives of thousands if not tens of thousands of American men, women and, this time, children. This is not to say that the clear quest for victory in Iraq, a quest that requires the utter defeat of the enemy no matter how dearly bought, will insure that no such attack happens in America. It is to say that, should we retreat from and fail to secure victory in Iraq, such an event moves from a probability to a certainty.
As demonstrated above, the American response to such another lethal attack on the homeland is not hard to visualize. The only question will be whether or not the state of total war that erupts will include nuclear weapons as a first option, or whether America will be content to level and destroy large Middle-Eastern states and populations with conventional weapons, holding back nuclear weapons as a final persuader. In either case, the opening salvos placed onto the countries involved will be far more staggering than anything seen since the closing days of the air war in the European and Pacific theaters of World War II. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Caroline B. Glick, writing from Israel, agrees. She focuses on the primary source of Islamic terror, Iran, as well as the Gaza front, and sees the Israelis and the Americans more interested in appeasement than confrontation:
There is no doubt that as the leadership of Israel and the US lose their collective will to reconcile themselves to the reality of war, it falls on the shoulders of private citizens to tell them that they are wrong. Iran has been at war with the US and Israel since 1979 and today it has a leadership committed to advancing this war by destroying Israel and bringing America to its knees. In light of this danger, and in view of the clear lessons of the Holocaust, it is an act of cowardice and immorality for those who recognize the dangers to take a back seat to leaders who refuse to stand up for their countries.
As (Mayor of Sderot) Moyal said, it is time to face the facts. There is no middle way. You cannot nuance genocidal foes bent on your destruction and defeat.
It is hard to argue that one should always aim to win when entering a war. Unfortunately, our disproportionate power, and the idealization of victim-hood over the last half century, combine to create our most significant impediment: Good guys never shoot first.
In the traditional American western, the genre that has done so much to define our national ethos, the good guy (wearing the white hat) never ambushes the bad guy (wearing the black hat) and never draws his weapon first. This is an enduring ethic of America and is one of our defining myths.
Our enemies fired many shots prior to 9/11, but we only unleashed a small amount of our destructive power after 3000 of our people were murdered. It is now 5 years later and we have been so successful at not being attacked again (whether because of our government's efforts, our enemy's incompetence, or luck) and we no longer feel justified in striking back with overwhelming force. In the same way, the Palestinians, because of their ineptitude, have been incapable of inflicting devastating harm on Israel. Both America and Israel cannot, in these circumstances, fight the Total War that is necessary to win.
Hillel Halkin, in On the Beach, a title perhaps unintentionally apocalyptic, makes a chilling point about the Israeli war with the Palestinians, and the rain of Qassam rockets onto Israel:
It's ugly to say it and ugly to think it, but if in the end these attacks can only be stopped by killing more Palestinians than the Palestinian people can bear to have killed, thus forcing them to pressure their leaders into putting an end to them, that's what will have to happen. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.
I fear we cannot do what is necessary to win this war because we are not yet ready to kill more of the enemy that they can bear and thereby force them to surrender. The Islamic fascist enemies have shown their willingness to fight to the last man, woman, and child (and are not particularly concerned about who the men, women, and children are that they kill or endanger, forcing us to kill.) They are waging Total War against us and are only constrained by their ineptitude and lack of capacity, not lack of will. We are fighting a very limited war against them, lack the will to wage Total War, and have no ability to win in such a setting.
Our hope in Iraq is that a government by Iraqis will have the will to wage a more vigorous war against their countrymen.
Unfortunately, for the United States, Israel, and the West, we are left waiting for a sufficient atrocity to ignite our will to wage Total War. Short of that, we will continue to muddle through, waging an essentially defensive or limited war against radical Islam. Five years post-9/11, we have lost the initiative and paradoxically, we will only recover our initiative after the next sufficiently horrific attack, and the "Fire Next Time" will be terrifying to everyone.
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